Thursday, 19 July 2012

EnCharter Alpha

I've got to the point where there's enough to EnCharter that it's worth giving it to people to play with.

Packaging the program as single executable files is an absolute pain, though, so at the moment there's only the mac version available for people to play with. I suppose the individual bits and bobs of python files that I'm making it from can be made available, but I'm not sure I want to put you through that.

So, let me know if you want a go on the mac version.

The windows version is next.

ETA: If you'd like to have a go with the mac alpha, there's a version available here.

Here's the 'need to know' list for the alpha:

It may not run at all. It appears to be very difficult to get a program built using PySide to cleanly export as a single executable file. However, I'm very, very interested if you download the program and it fails to run - email the error message to ellielabelle@googlemail.com

This is for testing the basic functionality of placing stitches in a grid. At the moment, we're only on stitches that take up one grid square. Complicated Estonian lace and cable stitches are something I hope to handle in the near future, though.

The evaluation button should provide accurate results unless you've incorporated blank stitches in your pattern. Blank stitches are another component that means totally reworking the handling of the pattern storage.

Things that should work:

navigating and placing stitches with the mouse and the keyboard

save and load files

export to pdf

clear all should clear the grid and restart with a 10 x 10 grid

resizing the grid outside the main window should give you scroll bars

resizing the main window should proportionally resize the contents

the about box should contain a message

Known issues:

the print options aren't connected to anything yet

the text on exported pdf charts is very jaggy

Future features:

Export as written instructions for the chart-phobic

Export with an automatic legend showing the meaning of stitch symbols used in a chart.

Custom stitches?

Moving towards a 'stitch palette' idea where you choose the stitches in the clickable order from a wider selection. It'll make sense later, you'll see.

ETA2: Yes, version 0.0.1 on the mac didn't actually work. But it's fixed now and v0.0.2 is now sitting in the directory as linked above.

There's also a Linux version in the same place now.

Known issue on the mac: The menu bar isn't populated correctly, preventing you from accessing such useful features as 'save' 'load' and 'clear all'.

ETA3: Windows version now available here.! PyInstaller is absolutely cracking for making apps and exe files out of python things. Even I can do it!